I am relieved.
I did not want to be lying to Muir Callaghan about having moved on. I have been lying to myself about having moved on, whichis a different and substantially more embarrassing project, but I did not want to be adding the other lie on top of it.
The one where Rex and I are a real thing and Muir is a non-issue and nothing about his return to Harmony Glen costs me anything. The lie was for the Bennett sisters and Mr. Calloway and the town’s interested attention. I had not wanted it aimed athim.
I hate this. I hate that I can feel this relief and know what it means and not be able to deny what it means.
“Don’t say anything,” I tell Rex.
“I wasn’t going to.”
“Your face is saying things.”
“My face is doing nothing.”
I turn around and look at his face, which is, infuriatingly, doing nothing. It is entirely neutral, giving me nothing to push against.
“I’m going to Liana’s,” I say. “I want to restock some specialty items for the Snack Hut.”
Rex picks up his coffee. “Okay.”
“This conversation isn’t finished.”
“I know.”
“I’m still angry at you.”
“I know that too.”
I grab my keys from the hook inside the door and go, and the fury accompanies me down the path, past the waterfront, past the crystal shop and the hardware store, all the way across townand up the gentle hill to the other side of Harmony Glen where Liana lives.
It is a rambling property especially now that Roarke, her mate, has joined their properties together. A white house with a wide porch, an enormous vegetable garden that has long since exceeded what any two people could eat, fruit trees, raised beds, a chicken run of ambitious proportions, and the general atmosphere of a place where a person has looked at a piece of land and said:everything I need is possible here.
I hear the chickens before I see anything else. And then, over the sound of the chickens, I hear a large animal herding smaller animals. A low rhythmic sound, somewhere between a purr and a rumble, with an authoritative edge that the chickens clearly respect.
I come around the side of the house and stop.
Nugget is moving six chickens from the garden beds back toward the run with the focused, unhurried efficiency of a working dog who has done this a hundred times and has strong opinions about the correct way to do it.
He is the size of a pony, deep bluish bronze in this morning light, with wings folded flat against his back and a tail that he uses as a kind of rudder for his turning radius. He is crouching low on his haunches and using a very border collie-esque herding technique to move the chickens in the direction he wants without startling them.
One of the chickens breaks left. Nugget extends one wing—just slightly, the minimum necessary—and the chicken reconsiders.
“Good boy,” says Liana, from the garden gate, and Nugget makes a self-satisfied sound that is not quite a growl and not quite a chirp and is entirely too pleased with itself.
She’s framed in the gate opening—five-foot-eight and curvy, her light brown skin sun-warmed, her black hair braided and wrapped into a bun at the back of her head. The Dragon Mom T-shirt is faded soft, stretched comfortably across her frame, and her cut-off shorts are the kind that sayI have a garden and I work in it. She turns when she hears me on the path and reads my face in the three seconds it takes her to push the gate open.
“Come in,” she says. “I made arroz caldo this morning.”
This is what I mean about Liana. She doesn’t require an explanation. She doesn’t ask leading questions or arrange her expression into careful sympathy or offer interpretations of my situation that I haven’t requested.
She just moves me into her kitchen—warm, cluttered in the good way, every surface doing useful work—and puts a bowl of arroz caldo in front of me and sets a plate of ube pandesal beside it and goes back to whatever she was doing before I arrived, which appears to involve sorting dried herbs into labeled jars with the focused energy of someone who finds this genuinely satisfying.
The arroz caldo is perfect. That is not an exaggeration. She makes it with ginger and fish sauce and calamansi and it tastes like being taken care of, which is precisely what it is meant to taste like, and I eat half the bowl before I have formed a single coherent thought.
“Roarke’s at the clinic all day,” she mentions, not turning from her herbs. “So it’s just us and Nugget.”
From outside comes a sound of continued chicken management, serene and competent.